April 29, 2023
James Harvey: The truth about ‘A Nation at Risk’
Published by Peter Greene
Writing in Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet, James Harvey gives some first hand insight on the con job that was A Nation At Risk, the Reagan-era report that kicked off the modern education reform era.
There were at least three problems with what the commission finally produced. First, it settled on its conclusions and then selected evidence to support them. Second, its argument was based on shockingly shoddy logic. And third, it proposed a curricular response that ignored the complexity of American life and the economic and racial divisions within the United States.
Harvey explains how the commission cooked the books.
Holton’s draft went through 10 revisions as the commission cherry-picked and misinterpreted data to fix the facts in support of its argument. As James W. Guthrie, an academic who admired the report and thought it was on balance a good thing, put it: The commissioners “were hellbent on proving that schools were bad. They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”
The public was told that American students lagged seriously behind in international comparisons of student achievement, even though Sweden’s Torsten Husén, chairman of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), warned the commission not to do that. He said international achievement comparisons were an exercise in “comparing the incomparable” due to enormous differences in enrollment, curriculums, objectives, goals and the organization of school systems.
And not just cherry picking data, but using indefensible logic to build the argument. Harvey wanted to talk about schools as an engine of social progress, but the folks in charge had other ideas.
But according to the commission writing the report, public schools were responsible for Japan eating our economic lunch and for “one great American industry after another falling to world competition.” This language transformed schools from engines of social progress to engines of economic competitiveness. Mrs. Smith in fourth grade and Mr. Brown in Grade 11 had a very heavy burden to bear. (Japan was actually in an economic downturn in 1983 when the report was released.)
In an excess of bombast, the report declared, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” This language came perilously close to defining teachers and administrators as enemies of the United States.
What surprised me watching the individual members of the commission absorb this argument is that not a single public school educator in the group objected as the report with their names on it trashed their profession and cast educators as among the great economic villains of the United States. When I pointed out to Holton that our report ignored the appalling poverty, destitution and segregation in which so many American students lived, he shrugged.
Read the full piece here.
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